


Unveiled

by DaisyTaylor



Category: Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Introspection, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-18 16:57:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21280115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyTaylor/pseuds/DaisyTaylor
Summary: This was inspired by the scene in Suicide Squad when Harley and Joker are in Ace Chemicals.Harley was never pure and the Joker didn't break her. Harley preferred to do her own breaking.
Relationships: Joker (DCU) & Harleen Quinzel, Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel
Comments: 1
Kudos: 33





	Unveiled

Harleen was eight the first time she wore a veil. 

Well, it had actually been a faded tea towel that had a dark coffee stain smudging the corner. But in her mind, it was a veil - the most beautiful veil she could imagine with white pearls and pink lace.

She couldn’t remember which movie she had been watching that inspired it, but she became enamored with the idea of being a bride. 

Little Harleen married her stuffed animals and her dolls, she even married her brother Barry’s plastic army men. She would put on her nice Sunday dress and that faded tea towel and she would walk down the short hallway in her house, face dead eyes and say “I do.”

Her parents thought it was cute the first few times they witnessed her little ceremony, or rather they were relieved that she finally found a seemingly normal playtime activity.

Nick and Sharon Quinzel knew their little girl was...odd. Her mind moved faster than they could generally keep up with and took darker twists than any little girl’s should. She loved to read about Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper. They had once found her picking apart the skull of a raccoon that had been hit by a car near their house.

“Their brains are so tiny!” She had squealed with a delighted grin, blood staining her fingertips. “Do you think they can feel pain?”

On balance, her parents found her little weddings less concerning.

Her brother on the other hand didn’t care for her touching his things. They had fought about it several times before one day he caught her marrying his absolute favorite GI Joe. He stormed over in a rush and shoved her to the ground.

“You’re so weird and gross, no one will ever marry you!” He hollered as he liberated the groom from her clutches. 

Harleen had a stunned moment to let tears well in her eyes before fury filled her to her fingertips. She flew to her feet and with all of the rage an eight-year old could muster, decked him right across the face. 

This time it was Barry that fell to the ground and Harleen followed, wailing on him with fists and nails and a high, reedy voice screaming, “No, you’re gross! I’m going to get married a hundred times! And you won’t get to come because worms will be eating your eyeballs!”

In hindsight, Harley realized that was possibly not the best comeback she could have had. And given the punishment she received for breaking her brother’s nose and cutting three deep lines across his face, one of which had been deep enough to scar, she wishes she had been more articulate in her fury. Her parents took her tea towel and locked her in a closet while they took Barry to the emergency room. 

She supposed not everyone appreciated the irony of a boy being beaten by a bride for refusing to allow his dolls to participate in as girly an activity as a wedding. Trying to asphyxiate him by shoving said doll down his throat seemed like exactly the kind of violent and manly activity that GI Joe would like. 

And she was nothing if not flexible. 

But something in that event shifted something in her brain. She was weird. Everyone said so. Her classmates whispered it behind her back, her parents said it in low, worried tones when they thought she couldn’t hear, and now her brother, even with how stupid he was, managed to see the weirdness in her. Maybe she was too weird to get married. 

The thought chilled her. 

After her parents let her out of the closet, it was like a switch had flipped. She apologized to her brother and to her parents, and promised she wouldn’t lose her temper again.

And she didn’t. No matter how infuriating and slow everyone around her was, no matter how hard they made her want to rip them apart and chew on their bones, Harleen Quinzel became the perfect example of a little lady. 

She had all of the raw material, with her big blonde curls and arctic blue eyes she was practically a doll herself. 

She practiced smiling with fewer teeth, giggling, and looking demure. She hid her love of the macabre behind a mask of innocent curiosity and quickly became the star pupil in her science classes. She disguised her pathological need to pick people’s brains apart as a selfless desire to help those with mental difficulties.

She perfected her technique in her teen years. She would smile her angelic grin with just the right amount of teeth and say, “After my brother’s breakdown, I was introduced to a whole group of people that I had never considered before. It’s not fair to them; their minds failed them, but society failed them first by not giving them the help they needed. I wish there had been someone there to catch my brother’s symptoms before his break. Maybe I can be there for someone else’s brother.”

And people would think, ‘That Harleen Quinzel, she’s such a sweet girl. It’s too bad about that brother of hers.’

Harleen would smile sweetly and accept their gentle pats and condescension. She would visit the brother she poisoned with antifreeze in the asylum and leave beautiful and poisonous hydrangeas at his bedside. And she would smile.

She smiled for so long that her cheeks hurt. She smiled through teeth gritted so hard that she ground them down and needed caps to restore them. And when she thought she might lose her own mind from playing the part of this simpering simpleton, she only smiled harder.

She was determined to live out her childhood fantasy; she would find the perfect man and marry him wearing a beautiful gown and veil, and they would live happily ever after.

It was proving to be a rather difficult dream to chase. The boys she knew in high school were so idiotic, she would have been better off marrying a goat.

No, she needed someone clever, as clever as her. She needed someone that understood her and her darker impulses and loved her anyway. She needed a hero to come and sweep her off her feet.

Undergrad was just another disappointment. More goats, more smiles, no heros. 

Grad school was a little better. The goats were a little smarter, but as a woman studying psychiatry at that level, she was forced to smile as her pervy professors leered over her shoulder and trailed their withered fingers down the small of her back. She had to blush and look away when they made their comments about how they really enjoyed her _body_ of work and her truly impressive _assets_.

It took everything within her to keep from shoving her fingernails in their eyes and seeing how long it would take them to bleed out.

It wasn’t until she was pursuing her PhD that she met Dr. Markus that things changed for her. He was the first person that saw through the smile hiding her fangs. And he provided her with the perfect opportunity to sharpen them.

Arkham Asylum.

Unlike the pale, mint green colored walls of her brother’s loony cage, with it’s natural lighting and visiting hours, Arkham was for the truly dastardly. There were enough locks to keep Houdini occupied for a century and enough bondage gear to make even Harleen shiver. 

This was more like it. 

She worked with a few patients there - a murderer, a necrophiliac, even a cannibal - but then she was assigned to _him_.

He was pitch black nights and neon lights and everything Harleen should find repulsive. The former gymnast should want a guy named Chad or Pete. She should want someone in polo shirts that played golf on the weekends.

But this guy, this Mr. J, he was something new. He was all of the bloody and slimy stinking parts of her on display like diamonds, hard-edged and light bending. He was a blackhole that leached light from around him and threatened to pull in those that wandered too close. He was every malicious thought and violent desire she had ever had and he was staring right at her.

She thought at first that he must see her. The real her. He could be the first. Dr. Markus only saw her after witnessing an incident with her ex - a bloody incident.

But this Joker character could be the first one to see through her smiles. At first she waited for him to let on.

He was the card in the deck that most people throw away immediately, but she would keep him. If he would just let on that he saw her, she could keep him.

As their sessions continued, Harleen began to realize that while he was not like the others, he still couldn’t fathom her depths. She looked at him and saw a blackhole. He looked at her and saw a beauty queen. 

It infuriated her. 

She might have scheduled him for a few extra electroshock treatments after coming to that nasty realization.

Not only did he not see her, he mocked her for her feelings. She wanted so desperately to love him, she maybe even convinced herself that she did a little. And he used it against her to extort favors. It was only small ones at first, but then they started to grow. She knew it was only a matter of time before he pulled out his pièce de résistance. 

Her curiosity was strong, despite her rage, so she allowed herself to be manipulated. 

Could she arrange for this patient transfer? Yes.

Would she switch up the medication for the more violent patients to make them even moreso? Yes.

I need the security guard roster. Yes.

I need a machine gun. Yes.  
She felt like a bobble-head doll. 

She sincerely hoped this plan was coming to a point. She wanted to love him, but if all he would give her was a show, it had better be a good one. 

The plan started with an explosion - very much his style. After killing the guards and the other doctors and some of the other patients and plenty of time (too much time. She understood the desire for fun, but _priorities_. This was a prison-break, not a day at the beach. She could have been in and out in 13 minutes flat. 9 minutes if she was willing to get shot a little.)

Then he came for her and he hurt her and then tried to leave her.

That was unacceptable. 

He might not be her hero, but he still belonged to her. Her little pet project. And she was nothing if not viciously possessive of her belongings. 

Where he goes, I will go. 

She crashed into his penthouse with a nice croquet mallet she stole of a corpse formally known as Pete.

Where he lives, I will live. 

She meets (and kills) a few of his guy pals, but takes a shine to the handsome chauffeur that trails the Joker like a scavenger. That’s okay, she thinks. She’s always had a soft spot for scavengers. 

His people will be my people. 

She follows his insane rules and fulfills all of his tasks with relative ease. He is trying to scare her off, but the rules of polite society had always seemed insane to her too. What’s a little initiation rite compared to wearing spanx?

I will live by his rules and follow his lead. 

He leads her to Ace Chemicals Plant. She thinks he means to kill her here but she follows him anyway. She’s clever enough to tuck a knife into her waistband beforehand because there’s no way he’s making her leave this party without him.

Where I die, he will die.

But instead, he makes her catch her breath.  
With all of his dramatic grandstanding, he hardly says anything of import, but in the moments before she thinks she might kill him, he says something that shatters the glass around her mind that had been spider-webbing since her birth.

“Desire becomes surrender, surrender becomes _power_.”

And finally, she understands.

All at once she sees where she went wrong. How _could_ he see the real her? She had been hiding for so long, _she_ had never seen the real her. The monster inside her slipped out occasionally, but she never let it off its leash completely. She had been bending to what society expected of her since she was a child.

She _was_ a beauty queen and a gymnast and a nice girl and a daughter and a friend. She had never allowed herself not to be. She had never _surrendered_.

But now, the veil over her eyes lifted.

“Do you want this?”

This was the only wedding she would ever have, so she had to do it right.

“I do.” 

She was surprised the ground didn’t shake with her declaration, she felt it quake in her bones.

He asks her to beg, and for _this_ she does.

“Please.”

She walked to the edge of the platform and turned to face him again. He may not have seen her, but he saved her and for that she is grateful to him.

Something like peace washes over her and she smiles a smile that for once doesn’t hurt, her fangs on full display and she thinks she sees him startle.

She falls.

She’s heard jumpers that survive talking about their experience, how they regretted jumping the moment they hit air. All Harley regretted was that gravity moved so slow. She could feel something gripping her, something huge and she was _ready_.

Being submerged in bubbling chemicals hurt, but Harley felt like it was appropriate. Birth should be painful.

This new world she would find when she was out wasn’t ready for the monster it raised, but she was ready to drink it in with a straw. 

She re-emerged from the pool, saw Mr. J, and the whole new universe of possibilities he opened up for her, and she laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> I am going to be completely honest here: I've never even seen Suicide Squad. I saw a few clips on Youtube and got this idea worm stuck in my head. I also haven't ever read a comic book, so if you're thinking that I got something wrong with the backstory, you are almost certainly right. I am armed only with a five minute google search and obscene sleep deprivation. Let me know what you think.


End file.
